A business or enterprise may store information about various entities in the form of electronic records. For example, a company might have a customer database where each row in the database represents a record containing information about a particular customer (e.g., the customer's name, address, billing information, and purchase history). Moreover, different electronic records may actually be related to a single entity. For example, a first record for “Customer” and a second record for “Customer, Inc.” might both be associated with the same customer. In some cases, it may be desirable to consolidate multiple records to create a data store that contains a single electronic record for each entity represented in the database. Such a goal might be associated with, for example, a master data management program.
The consolidation process in a master data management program may be a time consuming and error prone operation. For example, an algorithm might review records looking for potential duplicates. When a potential duplicate is found, the algorithm or human operator might determine the best way for the information to be combined. The effort and costs associated with such a process can be difficult to justify, especially when a substantial number of records are involved. That is, a newly consolidated database might appear to a manager or supervisor as being substantially similar to a prior version that contained duplicate records.
Accordingly, a method and mechanism for accurately representing and/or depicting the merging of data records may be provided in accordance with some embodiments described herein.